None Like Us

Best Stephen Best

Description

It passes for an unassailable truth that the slave past provides an explanatory prism for understanding the black political present. In None Like Us Stephen Best reappraises what he calls "melancholy historicism"-a kind of crime scene investigation in which the forensic imagination is directed toward the recovery of a "we" at the point of "our" violent origin. Best argues that there is and can be no "we" following from such a time and place, that black identity is constituted in and through negation, taking inspiration from David Walker's prayer that "none like us may ever live again until time shall be no more." Best draws out the connections between a sense of impossible black sociality and strains of negativity that have operated under the sign of queer. In None Like Us the art of El Anatsui and Mark Bradford, the literature of Toni Morrison and Gwendolyn Brooks, even rumors in the archive, evidence an apocalyptic aesthetics, or self-eclipse, which opens the circuits between past and present and thus charts a queer future for black study.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 10 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781478002581
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

NONE LIKE US

A series edited by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman

NONE LIKE US

| , |,  

Stephen Best

Duke University Press Durham and London 

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker Typeset in Warnock Pro and Franklin Gothic by Copperline Books

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Best, Stephen Michael, [date] author. Title: None like us : blackness, belonging, aesthetic life / Stephen Best. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, . | Series: Theory Q | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers:   (print)   (ebook)   (ebook)   (hardcover : alk. paper)   (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: : Blacks—Study and teaching. | Aesthetics, Black. | Blacks—Race identity. Classification:   (ebook) |   .  (print) |  ./—dc  record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/

Cover art: Mark Bradford,Crow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth, London.

For Paul

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Having travelled over a considerable portion of these United States, and having, in the course of my travels, taken the most accurate ob- servations of things as they exist—the result of my observations has warranted the full and unshaken conviction, that we, (coloured peo- ple of these United States,) are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began; and I pray God that none like us ever may live again until time shall be no more.

DAVID WALKER, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World()

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CONTENTS

Introduction. Unfit for History 

  |        |

. My Beautiful Elimination  . On Failing to Make the Past Present 

  |     |

Interstice. A Gossamer Writing  . The History of People Who Did Not Exist  . Rumor in the Archive 

Acknowledgments  Notes  Bibliography  Index 